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Here are five important facts about this drug.
Praktiškumas
The main advantages of AstraZeneca and the Oxford University vaccine are their low cost (around £ 2.5 or € 2.75 per dose) and easy storage conditions.
The product can be stored in a normal refrigerator at 2-8 degrees Celsius, making it ideal for large-scale vaccination programs.
In comparison, Moderna vaccines should be stored at -20 degrees Celsius, and Pfizer and BioNTech products should be stored at -70 degrees Celsius.
According to the US Food and Drug Administration, frozen Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine ampoules can be stored for up to two weeks at a temperature normally maintained in pharmaceutical freezers.
Side effects
Denmark announced Thursday that it would temporarily not use AstraZeneca as a precautionary measure due to fears that people who had been vaccinated could develop blood clots.
Still, the country’s national health agency emphasized that it is not yet possible to establish a link between this vaccine and clots.
AstraZeneca itself stated that there was no evidence that its product posed an increased risk of blood clots, adding that this possibility had been “thoroughly investigated in phase III clinical trials.”
Austria announced Monday that it had stopped vaccinating AstraZeneca with a single batch, killing 49 nurses who had been vaccinated a few days earlier for blood clotting problems.
Estonia, Lithuania and Luxembourg also suspended vaccination of the same series, which was delivered in 17 countries and contained one million vaccines.
At the time, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) stated that severe allergies should be included in the list of possible side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19, with a possible link between these cases and vaccination in the UK.
On Friday, the EEA said it “recommended updating the information on this product to include anaphylaxis and hypersensitivity (allergic reactions) as side effects.”
Late delivery
The vaccine was first approved for use in Britain, which ordered 100 million. dose.
However, the delay in delivering the vaccines to the European Union – although at the same time they continued to arrive in the UK – has been harshly criticized by British and Swedish companies.
In January, AstraZeneca announced that it could contribute just a third of the $ 120 million. initially promised to all 27 EU member states in the first quarter.
That same month, the EU unveiled plans to unilaterally repeal elements of the “Northern Ireland Protocol” to the Brexit Agreement to prevent vaccines from leaving the bloc. Dissatisfaction in Britain, Ireland and Northern Ireland has forced the EU to soon withdraw a plan that many now see as a diplomatic error.
Italy recently blocked a shipment of 250,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Australia due to a “persistent” vaccine shortage in Europe and a “late delivery”.
Chimpanzees
This vaccine was developed using an adenovirus vector, which means that it used a modified virus that generally infects chimpanzees and used it to produce the SARS-CoV-2 needle protein.
This type of vaccine introduces the needle system into the immune system to stimulate the human immune system.
Once in human cells, the vaccine should stimulate the production of antibodies that recognize the virus.
According to the medical journal The Lancet, published on December 8, the vaccine is “safe and effective. Only one of the 23,754 volunteers in the vaccine trials had “possible side effects” with the vaccine.
This was a rare neurological case, transverse myelitis, which led to suspension of the trials.
Confusing results
The British laboratory, which published the preliminary results of the study in November, reported that the vaccine had an average effectiveness of 70%, while the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were more than 90% effective.
However, the efficacy of AstraZeneca was 90 percent in volunteers who received half the dose and a full dose one month later. Less than 62 percent. Efficacy was recorded in another group of volunteers who received two full doses of the vaccine one month apart.
Half the dose of the vaccine was accidentally injected into the volunteers, prompting criticism of the company’s reliability and prompting additional studies.
Recent studies by health officials in England show that after the first dose of the vaccine, the effectiveness of COVID-19 in the group of people over 70 years was between 60 and 73 percent.
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